Mice Fear Men

Mice Are Scared Of Men So Science Is Irrelevant

The moral of the study is: don’t build the foundations of deeper human understanding on the backs of small furry things that think you’re an asshole even before you’ve put needles in their balls.

Where would modern science be without mice? And men, for that matter? The two have collaborated since weird internet research articles immemorial, though not always equally. In fact the opposite of that. Mice are poked, prodded, bent and unfortunately even broken a lot of the time by bros in white lab coats, all in the name of getting results. Why mice? Oh, well, they’re conveniently everywhere and even PETA doesn’t give too much of a shit. You know. They’ve given our eggheads so much cell, organ, and behavioural data we probably owe mousekind an infinite supply of cheese-beer or whatever they’re into.

Actually. Maybe hold that cheese-beer order and brace for massive irony: New mouse-related research out of McGill University has revealed that mice are actually afraid of men. Not women, though. Just men. All that invaluable human data gleaned from science dudes making mice do strange things? Quite possibly invalid, as any results might well have been indicative of dude-induced stress on the part of the mice and not the experiments’ intended conditions.

“People have not paid attention to this in the entire history of scientific research of animals," said lead study author Jeffrey Mogil. "I think that it may have confounded, to whatever degree, some very large subset of existing research. If you're doing a liver cell study, the cells came from a rat that was sacrificed either by a man or a woman," Mogil added. “Its stress levels would be in very different states.”

The researchers used even more irony to conduct this experiment by utilising the ‘mouse grimace scale.’ It measured pain responses in any mice exposed to men, women, and especially their respective smells. Yep, it was the olfactory component that set the mice off, but not in the way you might think. Stress has the unusually desirable quality of numbing pain, and when the mice in this study were twitching their little noses at the scent of a man (but not a woman), they experienced less pain. Being that a lot of experiments require some discomfort on the part of mice, you can see how this might be a slight issue for science.

As the study went on, it revealed that the poor little micey-wicey also experienced increased body temperatures and higher levels of corticosterone (a stress hormone, unsurprisingly) the more they inhaled the smell of men. “Mice are afraid of the smell of males of any species,” Mogil noted after the study observed its mice reacting similarly to the stench of male dogs, guinea pigs and cats. It seems small consolation for the boys of science.

The researchers eventually concluded that mice are all-round beta scrublord virgins. They react like this because of competition and not predation, with male mice being very territorial even when it comes to females wandering into their imaginary cordoned-off areas. “It’s probably a little bit evolutionarily adaptive to have this effect until you can determine that a male that’s around doesn’t actually mean you any harm,” Mogil said.

It also knows no bounds. Check this out:

"If you put a male-worn T-shirt and a female-worn T-shirt in the same room, the female T-shirt counteracts the effect of a male T-shirt,” Mogil said, explaining that this indicates solitary males are of the most concern. Hey, just like modern dating sites. “A lone male is up to no good — either hunting or defending his territory."

So what’s the solution? Interestingly, the mousey stress effect ‘relaxes’ over time, eventually disappearing entirely as they get used to the idea of another man in the room. This takes an average of 45 minutes though, and science just don’t have time for that shit. Instead, Mogil thinks these findings will encourage researchers to report their genders and also shut Sweden and its gender-neutral pronoun initiative the hell up goddamn it Sweden, always being better than everyone.

“You don't have to go back very far to see studies where people didn't think the strain of mouse mattered or the sex of the mouse mattered," Mogil said. “But these things all matter.”

And the moral of the study is: don’t build the foundations of deeper human understanding on the backs of small furry things that think you’re an asshole even before you’ve put needles in their balls.